City council members in Boulder are pushing for more housing. At a recent meeting, they demonstrated that they are a major obstacle to that occurring. A developer wants to build fifty-nine new homes on a parcel of land. Fourteen will be townhomes with a price tag of $2.4 million. The developer is required to include some below-market housing in the project and hopes to recover that lost revenue with the townhomes. City officials were not impressed. One said, “Fourteen multi-million dollar condos is completely tone deaf to this moment in history. Those 14 condos should be replaced by many more units.” Replacing the townhomes with below-market housing would make the project financial suicide. Indeed, the developer told council that it doesn’t look like the project will proceed. And so, instead of adding to the city’s affordable housing, nothing will be built.
A landlord in New York City was recently ordered to pay $1 million to tenants because he “cheated” them out the discounted rents dictated by the city. The landlord was claiming tax credits for the rent-controlled units, even though he was raising rents more than the city allowed. Rent control is nothing more than legalized robbery. If a tenant paid his rent on the first, and on the second waved a gun in the landlord’s face while demanding a “discount” on the rent, we would clearly recognize the action as a crime. The principle doesn’t change just because the government is acting as a proxy for tenants.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Times told of the author’s emotions when she saw a white couple looking at her Little Free Library. “Instantly,” she wrote, “I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!” She was upset because she had created a “black space” and the couple had invaded it. If a white person had written a similar piece, he would be labeled a racist and public apologies would be demanded.